July 27: Night in Ruaha.

(As written in my journal that day; grammar and minor edits only. Italicized portions are additions written after the trip.)

As an aside, we'll be the only people who leave Africa fatter than when we arrived. Margarine, peanut butter, honey, jam - all this to go with our bananas, white bread, sugared oatmeal. Our lunch in Ruaha today? A boiled potato, a roasted plantain, a pretzel bread roll, 3 carrot sticks and 1.5 ounces of chicken (hey, I'm two years valiantly attempting Weight Watchers - I can spot 1.5 ounces of chicken across the room!).

Dinner featured rice and spaghetti. We're happy to have enough to eat; almost everyone around doesn't. But blessedly having enough doesn't equal having anything healthy; we still only have what there is - and I understand "protein starved society" now.

Most of us honestly notice tighter pants already, and I laugh tonight that we'll look Tanzanian women - nearly all of whom are larger than the men, softer, rounder, plump, bellied. It is a compliment to the man who provides for her - so we'll fit right in! 

First world problem in the third world today: Sure would be nice to have that stargazer app up and running on my phone so we could ID some Southern Hemisphere stars!

3 Points.

On Weight Watchers, you may regularly find yourself, after dinner, with 3 points left. About 10% of your daily total. So then you might find yourself making a list of all the things you can have for 3 points, and deciding which will be enough to turn off the food-thinking, Smitten-Kitchen-skimming, kitchen scrounging for the night... let me suggest a few items on that list...

• 4 ounces of wine
• 1 slice of toast with a teaspoon (teaspoon!) of jam or peanut butter (but not both)
• 1 Thomas' English muffin, plain
• a large mug of strong hot cocoa, made from the powder with water
• a small bowl of oatmeal with berries or frozen unsweetened peaches stirred in
• just-under-one-shot of vodka with soda water
• 40% of a regular sized candy bar, or about 2 sticks of a KitKat
• 8 ounces of orange juice
• 1.5 graham crackers
• 3 cups of popcorn without butter

All this, with an eye on the prize... happy hour after work on Friday night! For that's where all the points go. 

You know Weight Watchers has become a lifestyle, not a diet, when...

The girl at the grocery store check-out-stand says to your husband, who has shopped faithfully only from The List and picked up no other extra items, "Are you REALLY going to eat all those vegetables?"

And he says, "Yeah! We totally are. Just me and my wife, even."

Then she looks askance at alllll those green things, just for two lil ol' people, and says, "My dog likes to play catch with Brussels sprouts," as she plunks them on the scale.

Yup, I'm feeling pretty proud. It's a tough world out there, with Michael Pollan's "edible food-like substances" at every turn!

Preach to the choir, reap the reward!

When you love to bake, you find other people who love to bake. And then you talk about baking. You IM about baking. You swap recipes and you leave Tupperware containers on each other's porches. And if you preach the great gospel of the Smitten Kitchen, you might get a container of rhubarb snacking cake, smack in the middle of rhubarb season!!

The only problem with this recipe was that the baker and so-called "friend" who left it on my stoop left FOUR giant squares of it. Scoff! Friend! No, not a friend. A temptress. Smitten Kitchen's recipes are not trifles; they prove any and all diet-preachers wrong who claim you can hope to break an addiction to sugar. Smitten Kitchen cackles with laughter at this idea. And to top it off... I, like this "friend", live with a person who inexplicably cares not for rhubarb and didn't eat a single bite!!

So I hope you agree that I consider it Herculean to only ate 60% of what she left for me and save 40% for my brunch guests the next day.

Problems in a Pile

So at a comedy venue the other night, the house manager was a beautiful woman, with the kind of skin they probably use to design Photoshop templates. Flawless skin, a great figure, wearing a sleeveless top when she assisted the bus boys in clearing a few tables and picking up tossed-aside programs.

As she made her way through the audience toward the end of the show, cleaning a few items, I found myself admiring her arm and shoulder. I am pretty obsessed with arms right now - I have this vision in my head of what I want them to look like - since the next step of fitness on the Weight Watchers program for me has been adding in strength training, and I'm enjoying the journey of sculpting the arms. To be fair, the arms I really want I can't have... I don't think they'll ever be as thin as I desire... so instead, I am actively trying to make a new goal, and finding beautiful, toned, muscular arms to admire and strive toward.

Her shoulders were tough and strong, not tiny, but oh, so lovely. I can really covet a great arm in a sleeveless top, let me tell you. Add in that perfect skin, and I'm thinking of adding reps to my workout already.

And then she turned to double-back through the room.

And you could see that she had one lovely shoulder and arm; and she also had one smaller, still lovely, shoulder with an amputated arm above the elbow.

Covet away, Emily, covet away. There's an instant lesson for you!!

Have you ever heard of the pile of problems? Bring together 100 people, some you know and some you don't. Pop all your problems into a pile of 100 scraps of paper and choose one. Do you pick someone else's problems - the ones you can see, the ones you can't, and the ones they hide written on their piece of paper? Or in the end, do you pick the problems you know, understand, can handle and own?

More Zumba Wisdom

Oh, you laugh - and laugh away! It is a silly title. But my lovely, authentic and fun Zumba teacher said in class the other day, "If you want to lose weight in your hips, you have to vigorously move your whole body. And if you want to lose weight in your arms, you have to vigorously move your whole body. If you want to lose weight in your belly..." And everyone laughed, and kept dancing, and she added, "Your body decides what its weight loss process is going to look like, and where it comes from, so we'll just keep moving."

I've hit a plateau in the weight loss - or rather, I've lost the motivation to be disciplined enough, since early January, to lose the 6 or so last pounds that will in turn display The Number I Want on the scale. I don't need to lose these pounds, but it turns out that following Weight Watchers 5.5 days a week and doing almost whatever you want 1.5 days a week doesn't cut it. That will keep you at exactly the same weight - which, I admit, is an accomplishment of sorts! - but with the cherry blossoms arriving, real food starting to grow again (no more apple, orange, banana Every. Single. Day.), and a renewed commitment to reaching the goal, I'm back on the wagon. 7 days a week.

Keepin' it real.

As an employee of your federal government, I have joined a gym in the federal building for said employees. It's about as low-fi as they come, in a basement, and I'm happy to have an affordable gym option.

There are poster boards with how to sign up for a workout buddy, what classes you might want to take, goals to track with little silver star stickers, like lifting the most weight in your age group, as well as food advice/tips/recipes, motivational sayings and a gym member of the month feature.

But you gotta love the honesty. One of this month's health tips, along with "Take the Stairs!" and "Eat One More Vegetable Today!" is "Drink Less Alcohol!"

Less, my friends. Less. We live in the real world, after all.

The pleasures are small, the laugh was great.

On Weight Watchers, you can be any kind of person. You might eat and eat and eat until your points have run out at 4 PM, and then you're on to water and fruit for the night. You might starve and starve and starve until lunch, and then spend the day catching up in delectable snacking.

Or, you can be like me, and on most days, you are very strict and regimented and balanced from morning until night, saving and planning and plotting for the evening points to provide a dinner that can be filling - perhaps with 14 grams of cheese sprinkled on top! TWO teaspoons of butter! ahhh, the little things - AND so that dessert is possible.

And so, perhaps it's the influence of my current British novel, but I've been eating tea and toast lately - and there's nothing better. But tonight, my new package of Chamomile tea set me laughing; it advertises on the side, "Now With Richer Chamomile Flavor!"

Known for it's rich flavor, indeed!

Hell

I'm surely going to foodie hell... but, but, but... these cherries from Chile for $3.99 a pound taste sooooo good after going on month four of bananas, apples, oranges, bananas, apples, oranges!

At the end of a non-WW weekend...

Today, after four days of glorious eating, drinking, wine tasting, staying up too late, visiting with friends and going to gatherings... not to mention cooking and hosting my very-first full-on Thanksgiving dinner at home!... it is back on the wagon.

The Weight Watchers wagon.

But at the end of the weekend, while the homemade rolls (Rouse family easy bread recipe to the rescue!) were delicious slathered in butter, and the pumpkin pie made by my sisters-in-law was a triumph (all from scratch including real baking pumpkins) with ice cream AND whipped cream, and the smoked turkey that John masterfully BBQ'd (in the rain) on Thursday afternoon was the last word in moist turkey meat, the best part, the very BEST part was: the stuffing.

I love stuffing. But I don't love celery, and I don't love undercooked onions, I don't love bland bread and I don't like garlic in there. And so, for the very first time ever, I made stuffing precisely the way I like it, with all the parts from others' stuffings that I admire in one big dish... and I ended up with such a success that 2 hours of dishes didn't even matter, because now I know what my very own Thanksgiving stuffing will be, year after year!

So in case you're wondering: Mrs. Cubbison's cornbread stuffing with a lot of onion slo-o-owly sauteed in even more butter, with a big pile of fresh sage and dried thyme, and water chestnuts. It all marinated for 2 hours in the fridge and then I stirred in the liquid (just water, not chicken broth, for the non-meat eaters) and baked it for 40 minutes in my mini-casserole dish. Perfection!

Down, down, down we go...

So, a Weight Watchers update on me and John - for those looking to cheer*, to scold**, to take inspiration*** or derive jealousy**** from:

I'm down 23 pounds and John's down 42. (!!) As for the high point and the low point so far...

While I dearly love Ann Taylor LOFT for letting me fit into a size 2 skirt at the outlet malls last weekend (and for $13 I sort of had to buy it, so they are the real winner), I also know better that I'm about a 6 right now. And THAT feels as great as a 2 ever could, don't get me wrong! It's basically the size I was back at age 23, when I lived alone over the winter on Cape Cod and only had one friend and ran on the beach a few days a week AND didn't know how to cook yet.

As for the downside, I am now cold most of the time. It is a noticeable difference from last autumn. Sure, I've always had cold fingers and toes, but I have never been downright shivery for much of the day! I am surprised, and not pleased about this. But since I have to buy all new clothes anyway, I guess it's just time to implement a style based on layers and buy a second (or third) pair of fleece jammie pants.

* many, many friends are wonderfully supportive and take joy in our success;
** some friends tell me I shouldn't even care about losing weight, or about maintaining a silly number on the scale - and some hear the number 23 and say, don't lose any more!;
*** I think I can safely be held partially or wholly responsible for about 4.5 other people joining in the last few months;
**** well, yes, it's very rare but we're Americans and this is weight loss - pretending this doesn't exist is just a lie.

Unexpected

So here's a funny one. When you are on Weight Watchers, you have NSVs... non-scale victories. This would be something like losing inches, fitting into an old shirt you loved, or truly feeling satisfied with a very small dessert.

An NSV in our house this week? I had to get rid of two belts.

And now they fit John.

Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!

10

What things weigh ten pounds? Well, I almost did, when I was born. I believe I was 9 pounds 8 ounces (and I am sure my mother will set me straight in the comments!).

A big bag of sugar weighs ten pounds. A bowling ball - a small one - weighs ten pounds. Some dogs and cats weigh ten pounds, and Google says a gallon of water weighs ten pounds.

But what weighs ten pounds less? Me! Less than I did on May 21st at least, the day I started Weight Watchers!

I have put off writing about the program because it has a silly name, because some days I absolutely hate it, because it has made me deeply address my relationship to food and alcohol on a daily basis (as in, how they is my daily (or thrice daily) reward to self), because John and I are doing it together, and because it sort of feels temporary. Could I stay 10 pounds down? Could I maintain this? Could I feel more positive about my body at any given moment than negative? (This is the biggest change; looking in the mirror and saying something nice to myself. It's like living on a new planet.)

My goal, for those wonderful readers who remember a post from a couple years ago (that I am too tired to find the link for, sorry!), is to lose 20 pounds. Two years ago a doctor recommended I lose 15 to 20 pounds, and I thought, gah! What? How? Eat less and exercise?! Please! Like I can do that!

It turns out, I can! After 5 pounds were gone, my clothes started to fit and feel better. And now at 10 pounds gone, some things are really too loose to wear. And so while some weeks are going better than others, it's an overall downward weight trend, so maybe I can go back to that Doogie Howser lookin' doctor in another couple months and say, look! I did it!